Notes on Movement and Breath

According to the body’s design, every breath we take should tone the entire organ body housed between our diaphragm and the base of the pelvis. If all goes to plan, with each inhalation, the diaphragm and pelvic floor will lower, the psoas will settle back with its extension, and the rectus abdominus will move forward allowing for the stomach, kidneys, intestines, etc to be pressed in and toned. Since all is balance, exhaling brings everything back to normal. In a way, each breath is equivalent to giving your organs an energizing massage.

If we breathe correctly, our muscles work like the finely tuned engine of an expensive sports car. But if any of these muscles are off – such as a tight psoas or a weak pelvic floor, our body becomes more like an old Dodge Dart, sputtering along all right, but liable to break down at any time.

The Body Works in a Specific Way.

It has been my experience that people simply don’t know how they operate. Most clients that come to me are experts in something and could probably talk at length about their given field. But very few could tell me exactly where or how their head is supposed to sit on top of their body. This is amazing to me as your general health has a great deal to do with how your head sits atop your spine.

The understanding of the body’s mechanics is a key component of our ability to change our posture. If you knew that your foot was meant to fall in a specific way and were able to feel that falling that way felt right and seemed to take stress off of your legs you might be willing to do it. There are many ways to learn. Once you know how something works intellectually you will be able to start to change and adapt your patterns immediately. That’s why a general understanding of anatomy is a key part of our walking program.

A Place of Ease

There is a place of ease where the body is upright in such a way as to minimize the muscular forces working to hold us up. As we learn to live there on a regular basis ease becomes a constant in our lives. Instead most of us live in the “forward plane” of the body. See for yourself. Stand up with the feet about four inches apart and just pay attention to how you hold yourself in space. Is the weight forward or backwards in your heels? Are your thighs forward of your ankles or right over them? If in fact you are ever so slightly forward (bracing against gravity) The whole front of the body will become engaged in an effort to hold you up. This is involuntary. Our nervous system exists to create and maintain balance (homeostasis) and if it can’t have true balance it will foster within us an illusion of balance even though the illusion is making our muscles work harder over time and leave us exhausted at the end of the day.

Walking is a six sided experience

Walking involves moving the body front to back, from side to side, and top to bottom as well. If the whole body is aligned the front is as open and broad as the back, your legs are rooted to the ground as your head lengthens equally towards the sky. Your side body gets involved because the arms are free to swing and there is a gentle rotation through the trunk. When we find this elusive balance the body and all of its systems starts to flow more fluidly. Movement is at the heart of all healthy living. Until the heart stops breathing we will never truly be still. Skeletal and muscular alignment determines in large part how well energy, specifically the flow of blood and oxygen, moves through the body.

The Psoas in Infancy

Allow me a word or two about babies. It is so easy to see the little blobs that lie before us just that. Cute little blobs to be cooed at passed around for others to coo at. But physical development in the first year profoundly affects our posture for the rest of our life. The journey that we all take to become a standing individual imprints many patterns that can easily follow us through life. If we don’t think at some point of changing them there is no reason whey they wouldn’t be ours forever. If you can buy into that idea let’s look at the process of early development and the awakening of the psoas.

In a baby’s first six months the psoas lies dormant because the legs are not called upon to bear weight. It is actually important that the legs don’t bear weight at this time.

Among the many fascinating details of birth is that when we are born we are far from whole in the sense that many of our bones are very soft and some remain that way for some time. Your skull is actually a series of bones that overlap as you squeeze through the birth canal. Over the first ten days of a baby’s life you can feel the ridges of these overlapping plates before they slip into their correct place. Another trick of the anatomy happens within the pelvis. The pelvis is made up of three bones- The two hip bones and the sacrum. But the hip bones in utero and for about anywhere from nine months to a year after birth are made up of three separate bones (Ilium, Ischium & Pubis). Over the course of the first year these three bones, which meet up directly in the center of the cup (acetabulum) that the leg bone sits into, fuse. I bring this up to elucidate a very important aspect of baby handling. The neighborhood where we have our studio is baby central. Any time you walk into a restaurant it is a given that you will see parents and children and very often you see very young babies being stood up on their feet and held aloft by their hands. I’m not one to proselytize in restaurants- that’s why I make these dvds- but the friends that I have remarked to about this discreetly always say how much it seems that their babies love the feeling. It is hard to argue against the look of glee that is on their faces, it must be an amazing feeling to be up at your mommy and daddy’s eye level and upright.

Imagine though if you never stood your child up until he or she could stand on their own. After about ten months- the time it takes for the hip bone to fuse- of sitting, crawling and exploring a child will pull itself up to sand for the first time on a solid hip and confident footing.

This is all a key part of natural psoas development. In the same way babies should never be sat up by a parent. Newborns should really spend as much time on their belly as possible if not being held and babies should be allowed to find their movement markers on their own. The act of sitting up is one of life first and most primal achievements. How great would it be if a child could find its way their on its own.

There is a real emotional component to this process. Lets say a baby who has never been sat up finally – at around six months- makes its way to sit on its own. It knows how it got there and in turn knows how to move back to square one. The inverse is that the sat up baby has little control over its fate.

There is a similar emotional connection to babies on their bellies as opposed to babies on their backs. A baby on its belly is a grounded object it might not be able to crawl yet but it can touch finger and toes to the floor and have a ground sense of a protected umbilicus. Babies on their backs are kind of lost in space unable to do anyting but flail their hands and feet to no avail.

Now these are all pet peeves of mine but they are very connected to the intrinsic development of the psoas. Like I said earlier the psoas lies dormant in infancy and awakens in the baby’s first movement from hands and knees to sitting. For many babies sitting up and beginning to crawl often coincide. And crawling before standing is the next key phase in psoas development. With crawling comes lengthening and toning that prepares the muscle help the bone to bear weight as the young skeleton makes its first forays into the world of standing. Creeping around the furniture can take a good while before the babies true first steps. And in that moment, truly one of lifes grandest, where we first stand on our own we witness the true awakening of our most important muscle, the psoas, which in many ways will never relax again.

Stick Your Butt Out

It is important in both standing and walking to stick your butt out. This simple statement seems to go against the grain of what many people want to think and believe is correct. As a culture we love to tuck our pelvis. Maybe you hurt your back and a physical therapist told you to tuck under to lengthen your low spine; or you’ve done too many bad fitness classes at the gym, or you simply think your butt is too big. For whatever of the many reasons the vast majority of people allow the weight of the spine to fall backwards through the sacrum tucking the pelvis under and taking the femur (thigh) bones forward with it.

Standing up straight, and proper posture really is as simple as that, requires a skeletal adjustment to allow your thighs to move underneath your pelvis. This sticking out of the buttocks is actually meant to relax these muscles and help us find deeper core muscles to hold us up. We are truly a tight assed people. We grip our butts in tension and frustration, which is a natural reaction but as with everything we tend to over do it. The femur bones falling forward in space results in a constant engagement of the butt and thigh muscles (quadriceps).

When standing the quads and glutes should be working as little as possible to let important core muscles function properly. When we walk the big buttock muscle gluteus maximus works as the back leg extends backwards but it doesn’t or shouldn’t need to hold us up. Butt gripping is one of modern man’s great dilemmas.

The release of the butt goes hand in hand with a shifting of the pelvis. The effects of this shift are far reaching. As the thighs move back and under the pelvis your legs will release differently in walking and you will feel a more even distribution of energy through the foot with every step. The shift of the pelvis into proper alignment accesses the correct curve of your lower back which brings instant support to all the bones of the spine. Your shoulders will lift up and back naturally and the head will find greater support at the top of the spine.

Release your butt and embrace a whole new realm of energetic possibilities.